


Red from Red

by sleepyempress



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-22 23:18:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/615489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepyempress/pseuds/sleepyempress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The rebellion is always red.</p><p>She has lived to see many rebellions.</p><p>It is a color that worries and fascinates her. It reminds her of the work she has to do.</p><p>Her human is red on the inside. Just like all the other humans and too many creatures on this planet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red from Red

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oscura](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oscura/gifts).



The rebellion is always red.

She has lived to see many rebellions.

Red was the color that leaked out of the mutant the day she had him executed. It was the adornments of the winged idiot who came after him. It existed in a thousand little ways over a thousand sweeps, each of which required immediate, perfect erasure. 

It is also the color that humans bleed. She learned that soon after her (painfully unobtrusive) arrival on Earth. She likes this fact. It’s endearing, the way they are all the one color underneath, no matter how different they look on the outside. They explode into the same thing. Maybe their blood helped her decide that the company that presented itself with red boxes, red plastic lids, and a red spoon was the one worth claiming as hers. 

Maybe.

It is a color that worries and fascinates her. It reminds her of the work she has to do.

 

Her human is red on the inside. Just like all the other humans and too many creatures on this planet.

The human child is usually “her human,” sometimes “the human girl” during bouts of unruly behavior, sometimes “Jane” for efficiency’s sake. Never “her daughter.” The word “daughter” feels too close, too restrictive, gross in the way the oozing, biological way that snails and dissected eyeballs are gross. It’s an alien concept, anyway. There are too many alien concepts on this alien planet. They become overwhelming fast.

Besides, she is not being raised by an aquatic empress for warm and cuddly purposes. She will have a job to do, when the time is right. This is not an attempt at family. This is a calculated decision, an investment of time and energy that will be repaid. The isolation, the lack of third party help were also careful decisions. Communication with the outside world is limited. There is no staff, no nannies, no tutors, even though there could have been so many that she would never have to raise a finger to care for the girl.

She has regretted these decisions many times, as she is forcibly awakened at all hours of the day and night to administer bottles, change diapers, dispel nightmares, collect shed baby teeth, ease growing pains. The human wriggler is bizarre--too fleshy, too chubby, too loud, wailing in a language her caretaker can never decipher. She grows in odd spurts at bad times, usually as governments fall and reform in the outside world. She demands food. So do the people dying in every corner of the world. Let them eat cake.

She checks the girl often, examines her as she draws pictures with waxy crayons, struggles with her first chapter books, learns to swim with halting strokes. She keeps looking for it, that red, the wrong kind of red, the slightest pulse of resistance. 

But there are so many things to see when she looks at her human. The girl is lively, cheerful. Probably because she has no idea how small and isolated her world is. She’s smart and quick to solve problems. She likes puzzles, the kinds with letters and numbers, and the ones made out of cardboard pieces that come in boxes. She likes to read, after more or less teaching herself how to do so. Her favorite stories are the ones with detectives. Sometimes they read them together, when the corporate intrigue is slow. She moves up the rungs quickly, from the Boxcar Children to Nancy Drew to Miss Marple to Sherlock Holmes. The progression is oddly charming to watch, even to be proud of, like being the owner of a particularly intelligent pet. She was a good pick.

It’s good that she’s smart. She has a lot to learn. They start with baking, of course. There are plenty of embarrassing beginner mistakes, spilled clumps of flour, misshapen pastries, but she laughs them off, each time. She likes to laugh. She wanted the television because she said that they could watch comedians together, so that they could both laugh. Human comedy was never something her caretaker could fully appreciate, but the girl makes convincing arguments. A promising sign. She’s learning to think.

They watch a few sitcoms together, but _she_ did not travel at warp speed across the galaxy to watch mustached men make bizarre faces and consume their weight in animal products. She nudges the programming back to more mysteries, crimes, dramas. They can settle on the various iterations of Law and Order. This is also an important thing her human must learn, through every gunshot, every assault, every murder, even if they are fabricated: human beings are violent and cruel. They have strange ways, but their culture enables them, gives them these ideas and expectations. These ideas are old, established, enshrined, you see. They will eat their own kind, alive and screaming if need be, because they are so _hungry_. Eat them before they have a chance to snap at you. She is not bringing up a human to have the girl swallowed up the moment she must fend for herself. 

She makes her read _The Prince_ , then a few other books on human business that she’s grown to like. The girl does not like these as much. Her brow furrows as she reads them, and she asks many times if she can take a break, if she has to read the whole thing now, if it can wait until tomorrow because she really wants to decorate a cake with a new technique she thought up.....

In her free time she uses her computer more and more often. Of course, everything she does is painstakingly monitored. It’s a logical precaution, given the string of (however feeble) attempts on both of their lives. Her caretaker reads every single line of idiotic, neon-colored text she exchanges with these friends of hers. When the conversation veers into more dangerous territory, it’s easy to kill the connection, leave her incommunicado so she can focus on more important things. After all, it’s hard to tell how much time is left. Power vacuums are difficult to work with, especially after the governments start toppling.

On her thirteenth birthday, she is crowned in red, the red of the company, the empire she will inherit. The good, safe red. 

Her human is underwhelmed, disappointed, somehow, despite the gift. She smoothes the her hair, which doesn’t seem to help. They eat cake, a beautiful one they took turns decorating, laden with roses made of frosting, pale blue. After all their time together, they are still alien creatures to each other. She scrutinizes the girl as she adjusts her new tiara, knowing there is so much she will never be able to see or understand hidden in this human face. 

She realizes, despite her long life, how little she knows.

She does not, for example, know that soon her human’s face will erupt into oily, red spots. She does not know that one day the girl will stain her undergarments red, though no fault of her own. She does not know how easy it is to mistake the red of her new empire with the red of rebellion she has so long hated.

Neither of them know this, so for now they can sleep, dreaming peacefully of the miles of red that will mark their future.


End file.
